Added filter 'affiliate_click_amount_filter' to be called when affiliate unique click processing starts. The filter allows the site admin to set an amount to be used for the referral click transaction. Default is zero.

Version 3.1.5.6

Corrected reported issue with AFFILIATE_CHECKALL define when set to 'no' did not prevent Affiliate Advanced Settings from showing on Affiliate profile

Added new Affiliate details screen showing the transaction details for unique clicks, signups and paid members. For example on MarketPress paid orders will show link to order details screen for review.

Added new column 'balance' showing the net balance due to affiliate for payment. (Beta)

Reworked Affiliate Add-ons to limit certain options depending on if the Affiliate plugin is Network activated. For example Pro-Sites is only available when Affiliate is network activated.

Any User Can Do It

Use Affiliate with any regular WordPress, BuddyPress or Multisite installation – or adapt it to other payment gateways with ease.

This plugin allows any user registered at your site to simply become and affiliate by filling in their PayPal email.

They are then given a link they can then use to promote the site.

All of the unique clicks they attract, standard sign-ups and paid sign-ups are then tracked by the plugin and displayed – nicely – to the user and yourself.

Activate banners for easy referral sharing.

Paid Sign Ups

As mentioned, it integrates 100% with Membership & Pro-Sites so that when a free user decides to become a paid member your affiliate gets a piece of the action.

Track sales with powerful graphs and stats to see who your top performers are.

Not to mention the ability to simply (again, no code required) give your affiliates their own banners.

Allow users to use regular old links which you can track via referral marking so no one ever knows they are an affiliate.

Track stats with big beautiful graphs.

Bonus Ad Management System

This plugin also functions as an ad management system to help you track the effectiveness of your advertising with all of the same reports as you receive for affiliates.

You can use it for one or the other or both ads and affiliates in combination, without having to make any hacks.

In the case of an affiliate, you’re looking to see X number of referrals and Y number of paid signups.

When using it as an ad management system, you can easily track the same information for the ads you’re placing. Simply enter a fake PayPal email address that identifies the type and location of you’re placing, and you’re set to go.

Note: The MarketPress add-on is presently only compatible with the 2.9.x series of MarketPress, we’re working on making it compatible with MarketPress 3.0.

For WordPress Multisite installs – Activate it blog-by-blog (say if you wanted to make it a Pro Sites premium plugin), or visit Network Admin -> Plugins andNetwork Activate the plugin.

Once installed and activated, you will see a new menu item in your admin: Affiliates.

Let’s configure some settings, click on Affiliates > Settings.

Affiliate Settings

Here you will see a full page of options, let’s go through them section by section.

Affiliate Link URL

Enter the Link URL that will be provided to affiliates for referral links. The plugin will automatically take care of appending their referral ID to the url.

Currency used for PayPal Masspay

Enter the Currency you’ll be using for payments, this will be reflected in the exported Masspay file. The PayPal masspay file link takes you to PayPal’s site to find out more about Masspay.

Column Settings

Here you can enter the terms used for the columns in the reporting tables that affiliates will see.

The terms you can customize are as follows:

Unique Clicks

Sign ups

Paid members

You can, for example, change ‘Paid members’ to ‘Paid affiliates’ if you prefer.

Profile page text

You can further enhance the experience for your users by providing content specific to them or your site. The same visual editor used for Posts is available here for customizing those messages.

The Affiliate settings profile text editor lets you customize the initial content they see in their affiliate section.

And the Affiliate advanced settings profile text editor lets you customize the advanced content users see regarding their referral links and URL tracking.

Banner Settings

Affiliates lets you provide banner ads as well, you simply provide links to the images and it will make the banners available to affiliates along with respective referral links.

The Enable Banners drop-down lets you enable or disable the banner image section.

In the Banner image URLs text area, you can enter all the banner image links you want, one per line. The plugin will take care of displaying them neatly, with the relevant referral links, for your affiliates.

Approval Settings

You can allow payouts pending approved status using the Pay only approved affiliates drop-down. The plugin will still track the affiliate stats but no payouts will occur for them until you manually approve them. This manual process can be very helpful for avoiding affiliate fraud.

Save your settings

Be sure to press the Update Settings button to save your settings when finished.

Add-ons

Affiliates provides a number of add-ons to extend its basic tracking functionality and allow you to track sales referrals. Click on Affiliates > Add-ons in the admin menu.

You’ll see a table of add-ons along with options to activate and deactivate them.

The list includes add-ons for integration with the following plugins:

Directory

Membership

Pro Sites

MarketPress

If any of those plugins are installed and activated, the respective add-on will be available for activation here. If a plugin isn’t both installed and activated, the add-on will indicate this with a ‘– plugin not installed’ note after the add-on’s name:

There’s also an Affiliates debugging add-on that can help to track down any existing cookie issues.

The Addon Status column indicates whether an add-on is Active or Inactive.

The Bulk Actions drop-down lets you toggle the activation status of multiple add-ons at a time. Simply tick all the add-ons you’d like to activate/deactivate, then select Toggle Activation from the drop-down and click the Apply button.

Hovering your mouse over a particular add-on will also display a link to Activate or Deactivate it.

Directory Add-on

With the Directory add-on activated, you’ll see a new Affiliates tab in the Directory settings at Listings > Settings.

Add-ons in Multisite

When Network Activated in Multisite, Affiliates works slightly differently. The add-ons will only be available for activation if the respective plugins are Network Activated as well. You’ll then see a Network Activate option under the add-ons.

Shortcodes

Besides full access to the Affiliates Plugin features in the Admin Panel, you can use any of the following shortcodes within your posts or pages to provide front-end access as well.

[affiliatelogincheck] – place this at the top of the page that you are planning on using the rest of the shortcodes on and it will display a login message if the user isn’t logged in.

[affiliateuserdetails] – mirrors the affiliate details form from the admin area (yellow box)

If the user isn’t logged in then none of the shortcodes will output anything (except for the top one).

As an example, you could create a page at Pages > Add New and call it ‘Affiliates’. And you could then include the following shortcodes in that new page:

[affiliatelogincheck]
[affiliateuserdetails]
[affiliatestatstable]

When logged-in users visit that page, they’ll see the Affiliate Referral section, where they can then become affiliates and see details about their referrals.

Logged-out users visiting that page would be prompted with a login message.

How users become affiliates

An affiliate system wouldn’t be much use without affiliates, so let’s see how we can get those affiliates started! Once a user is registered and signed in on your site, they’ll see a menu item at Profile > Affiliate Referrals.

If you’ve setup a page using the Affiliates shortcodes, users could access the affiliate details from the site’s front-end, simply by visiting the Page you included the shortcodes in. They will see something like this:

By clicking the edit link, they’ll be able to show or hide the affiliate options.

They can specify whether they want to be an affiliate using the Enable Affiliate Links drop-down, selecting Yes please.

They can then enter their PayPal Email Address. This will be used in the MassPay export process to automatically pay them for any referrals they generate.

By opting to become an affiliate, they’ll then see the following additional section.

The plugin automatically generates a referral ID for the user based on their username along with a unique number. It provides a Referral URL including that code for referral purposes.

Users can also enter a URL in the Your URL field. Any referrals made from that URL will automatically be tracked to their referral ID.

Users can utilize either or both of those URLs to refer traffic to the site and the plugin will track signups generated from them.

How referrals are handled

Affiliates uses a browser cookie to track referral clicks. When a user clicks through a referral link, a cookie is created in the browser that the plugin will later use to link further activity (such as a purchase) with that referral.

To avoid issues with users clicking multiple referral codes and thus negating the original link they clicked through, the plugin tracks the first click-through they used within a particular session. For that matter, it’s always a good idea to clear browser cookies when testing the tracking features.

Let’s take a look at the affiliate reports section, click on Affiliates > Affiliate Reports.

Affiliate Reports

Here you have a brief overview of affiliate stats as well as options for exporting payments and marking transactions as paid.

Select the reporting month from the Show report for drop-down.

To export a Masspay file, simply tick the box for each affiliate you would like to payout, then click the Export Payments button.

Mark the transactions as paid by ticking the box of each affiliate, then clicking the Pay Balances button.

Hovering your mouse over an affiliate’s username will display a few links.

Quickly pay the balance for this affiliate using the Pay Balance link.

Click the Manage Affiliate link to go to the affiliate management section for this affiliate.

Manage Affiliates

Here you will see a list of your users along with basic affiliate details. You can easily search through the users to pull up reports on each affiliate and their performance.

Hovering your mouse over the affiliate’s username will display a link that you can use to pull up reports for the affiliate.

Click the manage link to go to the Affiliate System Administration section for this affiliate.

Affiliate System Administration

Here you’ll see detailed stats per month for the affiliate.

When referral activity is available for a given month, the month will be presented as a link. You can click on the month to show details specific for that month. The following is an example of what you’ll see.

You’ll see that within the Note column, there are links provided depending on what the recorded affiliate activity was for. In the above case, there’s a link to a MarketPress Order.

You will also find a handy chart and some options to debit, credit and set payment on the account.

To add a credit to the affiliate’s account, select a month from the Period drop-down, enter a monetary Value, add a note in the Credit for field and press the Add Credit button. This will credit the affiliate’s account, awaiting payout.

To subtract money from an affiliate, select a month, enter the amount to subtract and some notes, then press the Add Debit button. The affiliate’s account will be debited by the amount specified and will affect the payout.

To add a payment, set the options and press the Add Payment button. This will payout the affiliate immediately.

Advanced Usage

Affiliate provides a lot in the way of advanced options to help you customize it more to your specific needs as well as being extendable by way of custom code. Let’s take a look at some advanced customization features.

Affiliate Cookie Days

When a user clicks through a referral link and signs up, the signup will be credited to the affiliate whose link they clicked. Affiliates defaults to 30 day tracking of those referrals.

To set the amount of days that you want affiliate tracking to take place, you can do so by adding the following code to your wp-config.php file within the root folder of your WordPress install.

define('AFFILIATE_COOKIE_DAYS',45);

You can substitute the 45 with any number of days you want.

AFFILIATE_COOKIE_DAYS code added to wp-config.php file

Recurring affiliate payouts

When used to track referral sales, Affiliates defaults to paying an affiliate for the first sale only. That can be changed by adding the following to your wp-config.php file:

define('AFFILIATE_PAYONCE', 'no');

With that added, affiliates will be paid for every single payment made by the referred user.

Customizing the affiliate reference code

By default, Affiliates uses a simple formula to generate referral codes for users. For a prefix, it utilizes the username and for a suffix, it uses the user ID + a keyed value (35 by default).

This normally entails that affiliates get referral URLs like so:

http://yoursite.com/?ref=username-36

http://yoursite.com/?ref=david-37

You can alter the prefix so that instead of using the username, it uses whatever prefix you want, by adding the following to your wp-config.php file:

define('AFFILIATE_REFERENCE_PREFIX','myprefix');

You can also change the key, by adding this:

define('AFFILIATE_REFERENCE_KEY',1);

Given the above changes as an example, affiliates would have referral URLs like so:

http://yoursite.com/?ref=myprefix-2

http://yoursite.com/?ref=myprefix-3

Replace referral cookies

As noted previously, when users click a referral link, a cookie is created in the user’s browser that will attribute their signup to the account of the referral code they clicked through.

By default, this won’t be overwritten if the user then clicks through a different referral link. But this can be changed by adding the following to your wp-config.php file:

define('AFFILIATE_REPLACE_COOKIE', 'yes');

Using that, any referral link clicked by the user will replace any existing cookie with the new referral code. This can be especially useful for testing purposes but can also help if you simply want the referral process to work differently than usual.

Advanced coding

For developers, there is an ‘affiliate_click_amount_filter’ filter hook available that is called when affiliate unique click processing starts. The filter allows the admin to set an amount to be used for the referral click transaction (default is zero).

That’s it!

We hope you enjoy using Affiliates and that you get lots of affiliate referrals!

If you have trouble with any aspect of configuration, code or general usage, or if you have a cool feature suggestion to make, please head on over to the community forums where support staff and other helpful members are waiting to lend a hand.